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submitted 1 year ago by Anticorp@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.

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[-] GarfieldYaoi@hexbear.net 19 points 1 year ago

Enshittification my dear comrades.

Granted, the more academic term is known as rent-seeking. Even lib economists warn against this and is the source of so many ills of society.

[-] UlyssesT@hexbear.net 10 points 1 year ago

Two exhaustively long comment chains in this thread so far insist that the problem is not enshittification but not enough passionate and innovative hustlegrinding.

morshupls morshupls

[-] duncesplayed@lemmy.one 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt "the real Internet" was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.

I've come to realize that it's always been shitty. That's my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn't understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.

The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn't because computers weren't powerful enough yet.

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[-] 9up999@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago

Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.

[-] Poggervania@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.

[-] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 13 points 1 year ago

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand ~~Rick and Morty~~ the Internet...

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[-] sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Things that are hard to believe still exist:

  • Linux
  • VLC media player
  • Pirate Bay (torrents/filesharing in general)
  • hard drives
  • email
  • google earth

Being a somewhat tech illiterate millennial (only knows how to navigate windows and passed a data structures class) it feels like any of these things could be eventually taken out next (probably not Linux just because it'd be the hardest)

I wouldn't at all be surprised if they found a way to monetize hard drives into a subscription based storage service

Mostly I don't understand much, but I know that I witnessed the internet turn from a fast clickable diverse wonderland to a place dominated by 6 websites which take up 4GB RAM to run, followed by the further decline of youtube (started going for ADHD related results in 2011), google (search results started sucking in 2019) and reddit (mods started getting banhappy in 2020)

[-] eldain@feddit.nl 17 points 1 year ago

We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:

Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.

Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.

Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.

Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.

There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes there have been a lot of improvements to the way businesses operate due to the internet. I love how banking has changed, internet shopping, remote work, and all of that kind of stuff. I think that's kind of separate from what I'm talking about though. I suppose I should have said the World Wide Web and not the internet, specially the WWW as used by individuals and groups for communication and sharing.

[-] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I actually despise the way banking has changed. Elder people, barely familiar with making calls from a mobile phone, are expected to use their phone banking app as a security token, to say something that happens every day. And that's talking about people that can actually afford a mobile phone with internet access.

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[-] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's not just the Internet, it's all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it's ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn't help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.

[-] Duckef@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago

Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.

[-] FortifiedAttack@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

Well, at least in terms of information security a lot of progress was made, you just don't tend to hear anything about that. I'd say the 2010s was the time where all that was being put into place, actually.

That exciting early 2000s Internet was unbelievably shitty. Nearly every widely-used protocol was easily exploitable or had massive flaws, hardly any encryption being in place, bad password practices and very little security-awareness among users, very widespread malware, etc.

There's definitely a lot of answers that are looking for a question out there, with lots of corporate greed in play, but I don't think it's quite as grim as you make it out to be.

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year ago

I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.

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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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